BigBlueButton developers recently held an open session (the first of many to come) with the community. Users participated from Porto Alegre (Brazil), Cupertion, CA (USA), Central IL (USA), Toronto, Ontario (Canada), Ottawa, Ontario (Canada), Guayaquil (Ecuador), and Istanbul (Turkey).
During the session, Fred Dixon, one of the BigBlueButton developers, gave an overview of
- BigBlueButton Community
- BigBlueButton 0.80 release
- Current development effort underway for BigBlueButton 0.81, which includes
- Capture of all events in the presentation area
- Support for students with disabilities
- Addition of text tool to the whiteboard
- Layout manager
The BigBlueButton Developer mailing list has over 1200 members. This session was highly valuable to us as we connected with some members who were that were working on similar BigBlueButton enhancements – specifically Ajay Gopinath who was working on improvements the whiteboard. It became clear during the call that some of Ajay’s work could be leveraged in BigBlueButton 0.81.
We know that over the last year there were 61,000 installs of BigBlueButton. Some of the participants on the call shared their applications of BigBlueButton, which included using it within a not-for-profit and K12 organization.
Our intent is to hold these calls on a regular basis going forward. To follow the up-to-minute developments on BigBlueButton, subscribe to bigbluebutton-dev mailing list.
The full recording (45 minutes) is available here (or click on the image below). Of course, we used BigBlueButton itself to host the session and it generated the recording. BigBlueButton uses popcorn.js to playback the recording.
We’ll definitely be doing more community calls on BigBlueButton using BigBlueButton. There’s lots of traffic in bigbluebutton-dev, but it’s great to talk and see other community members from around the world.
